On July 13th, 2008, two mysterious emails were sent to select players from an individual by the name of the “The Guide”. That led to a mysterious sign up page for some curious project named Rachel’s Walk, a project nobody knew anything about were nonetheless intrigued.

Over a thousand unique signups later, how things have changed.

Ever since that mail was sent I’ve been asked the same question numerous times: why send out an email for something that was hardly even planned? Didn’t it seem premature, especially considering the publicity circus that took place leading up to the last project?

Well, time for a glimpse at Rachel’s Walk history…

I thought of the concept for this project in mid-June, actually during a week of vacation when both my wife and son celebrate birthdays. At the time it was nowhere near the scope it is now, but it got me excited enough that I simply couldn’t contain myself.

But along with that I had an idea for an experiment: my last project, the one I personally called Shadow Watch (or BoL/SiD to the players), had a decent amount of signups because people knew I was the one running it. What kind of response would we get if people didn’t know I was running it? Would it be worth it to do? In order to find that out, the signup page has always asked for only the email address (since people knew it was me for Shadow Watch, they were more willing to provide full contact information. Such is not the case here; that level of trust did not exist). And, as expected, the signup page did not do as well as Shadow Watch did, at least not until the day we announced that we were doing it (for the record, that day we go 116 signups).

But what was Rachel’s Walk at the time the page went up? One could argue that it wasn’t anything: not much more than a passing thought, scribbles on a notebook I carry around. Besides the signup page, there wasn’t a line of code written, a single creative element designed. But as time progressed, especially after the involvement of Lauren and the others, we realized that this project could be so much more. And so it began to grow, and grow, and grow…

To give you a comparative reference, here is how the project currently stands compared to the past:

• Shadow Watch was a single database with a grand total of eleven tables in it (everything else was driven by XML). Rachel’s Walk is currently over 70 tables (does not include databases created by third party applications and services) that span at least five separate Microsoft SQL and mySQL servers.
• Every project we have run up to now was on the same physical server hosted at GoDaddy. For Rachel’s Walk we currently have six hosted servers at two separate locations, and a third location coming soon. One of our websites is load balanced for the first time.
• We have acquired six times more stock imagery for Rachel’s Walk than for all our past projects combined.
• I have a drive partition for all game content that has had to be increased in size at least three times (for those that are wondering: I have three separate backups I run – to DVD, off-site and to a separate USB thumb drive – that are run throughout the week).
  
• The Rachel’s Walk Visual Studio solution is at least ten times larger than Shadow Watch. It spans four separate assemblies, an undisclosed number of websites, and at last count contains over 50,000 lines of code (in C#) written entirely in house and specifically for this project.
• We have had at least three (maybe four) different project management solutions. To put the amount of content in perspective, the current project management site we are using has almost as many informational pages in it than the entire Wiki for The Lost Ring.
• In my original concept, I had planned no more than three “in game” characters. At last count, Rachel’s Walk has over twenty and climbing.
• Looking Glass Laboratories cost a little under $100 to execute. Shadow Watch had a total cost of $350. Rachel’s Walk has a running cost of over $4,000 so far in terms of hosting (websites, domains, bandwidth, etc…), content acquisition (stock images, software, third party licenses, etc…) and materials.
• I was doing this alone at first. We now have four active team members: graphic designers, content generators, professional writers, etc…

…and all the above is not counting the things we can’t really tell you. Suffice to say, it’s become something more than just a random thought in my head, and not something I was able to predict when the signup page went up.

From an implementation perspective, the workload involved in the design and development of this project is no different than other major productions out there. There is one big difference though: we don’t do this for a living. Unfortunately, we do have real world commitments, things that prevent us from giving exclusive attention to this project. For example, during this project’s existance I have lived in two different homes, had owned three different computers and have had no less than four different full-time jobs.

Had we the resources to work on this all day, this project would have launched and probably finished by now. But, alas, such is not the case. We try to set our own personal milestones, but everything from real life situations to changes in scope have pushed the dates further and further ahead, much to our personal dismay.

So, by today’s standards, we realize the signup page did go up too soon. But that was never the intention, and the page was never meant to linger for so long before game launch. The project simply matured, outgrowing the registration page and the short timeline that was originally planned. Would we do this sort of thing again, put up a page without any idea when the game will actually start? Admittedly, it’s hard to keep quiet about future projects anyway, but we will take these lessons in to consideration for future endeavors.

What does this mean for this game though? Rachel’s Walk continues being developed, inching closer and closer to the day when it is unleashed upon the world. Will it launch in 2009? Sadly, no… Right now my more realistic prediction is around mid-April 2010.

In the meantime, we would like to thank all of you and we continue to ask for patience and understanding for what we are trying to accomplish. We think it’s worth it: everyone that has come in and seen “behind the curtain” has seen how this project is doing everything possible to be revolutionary and shape the image of ARGs for years to come. We’re not going anywhere, and will continue putting our hearts and souls in this project to make it the best it possibly can be.

We hope you will not be disappointed, and we hope you enjoy the ride.

“Ever forward…”

David and I could hardly contain our excitement this morning when TheBruce, linked us to this article in The Guardian in which Keith Stuart writes:

But in some ways the really avant-garde work has been going on elsewhere – in the realm of the ARG, or alternative reality game*. Here, proponents like 42 Entertainment and Darklight Interactive create interactive experiences by placing information around the internet, on faked websites, forums and Wikipedia entries, encouraging players to work together to decipher the clues.

Maybe it is partially all the coffee I just consumed, but my heart is racing!  Our relatively small company has just been recognized on the international scene.  And in the same breath as one of the largest companies in the ARG industry.  We are extremely proud and frankly more than a bit surprised.

In the meantime, despite unfortunate distractions of our real lives — I continue to battle a chronic illness (which I write about in my other blog Novel Patient) and David has had to find a new job on short notice — we continue to move forward on Rachel’s Walk.  We’ve been working on all aspects of the game, but in particular Owen has been putting in a lot of hard work on writing copy for activities players will be able to do within the Dream Engine.

Much to my CPU’s dismay, I continue to render and render and render some more.  And in honor of occasion, I’d like to leave you with another small taste of what I’ve been working on.  Another “screenshot” from the game if you will.  This is one of my personal favorites, and I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Fairy River

As a programmer, one of the things that comes with the job description is knowing that some of the best things you will ever create may never see the light of day.

When the core development of Rachel’s Walk began, the “engine” that you use to navigate through and interact with the world was based on the traditional interactive fiction games of Infocom. Even though it had the added bonus of a graphical representation of the area you were in (we call it a “room”, even though it might not necessarily have four walls), the only means of interaction was a text box where the user would type exactly what he wanted to do.

This might sound like a very simple interface, but behind the scenes that can’t be farther from the truth. Rather than use an existing text parse (such as the “Z” interpreter pioneered by Infocom), I decided to write my own. I wound up with a very intricate text interpreter that was able to chop up a sentence in to parts of speech and determine what exactly you were trying to do. This included a word tree, so that multiple versions of the same command (“get” is the same as “take”, “pick up”, “grab”, “snatch”, “acquire”, “appropriate”, etc…) are treated the same way. This word tree even applied to items: it could be a “lamp”, or a “lantern”, or a “light”, or a “light source”, etc… You get the idea.

I spent weeks writing and perfecting this system, and am to this day still proud of it. It was one of the most remarkable things I’d ever created – from scratch – and everyone we showed it to was impressed.

But then we realized something… Who’s actually going to USE it?

I’m from a gaming generation that’s outdated by twenty years. Whereas a game like this might seem natural to me, the modern day “gamer” – who might not have been born when Infocom was around – wouldn’t know what to do with it. Think about this: consider every game that came out in the last ten or fifteen years… In how many of those games is the principle means of interaction typing text? I honestly couldn’t think of a single one in the last decade.

So that beautiful engine of mine was shelved.

In keeping with the traditions on which this game is based, we decided to use another “old school” game engine as a point of reference: LucasArts‘ SCUMM engine, an engine that drove some of the best games in the genre: the original Monkey Island trilogy, two Indiana Jones games, Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max Hit the Road and many more.

Comparatively speaking, designing this engine was absurdly easy. We now had only nine distinct on screen commands (give, open, close, pick up, talk to, look at, use, push, pull), mostly the same commands that are found in the LucasArts games mentioned above, and in thinking about it they had the right idea: you really don’t need more than that for a game of this nature.

Furthermore, unlike the SCUMM engine, you don’t actually see yourself in the world: it’s a first person view. There’s no way to actually move to another location in the same fashion as the original SCUMM engine (click and the character moves there). Therefore we had to use a compass rose as a means of moving from location to location.

Suddenly the learning curve for the interface is much more acceptable: click on a verb, click on an object (be it in the inventory or in the on screen view of the area) and done. We don’t have to worry about how many ways one can say “lamp” or “book”. We don’t have to worry if you wanted to “look AT” something or “look UNDER” it. The engine went from several thousand lines of code to a few hundred.

Unfortunately, we can no longer respond to someone typing “xyzzy”… You can’t win them all, I guess.

In March 2009, Darklight Interactive (“DLI”, for short) officially announced their upcoming game Rachel’s Walk. The team behind Looking Glass Labs now aims even higher to bring an unprecedented cross genre alternative reality game. Rachel’s Walk will combine elements of traditional ARGs as well as “old school” role playing, adventure games and interactive fiction to engage players in an unparalleled immersive world. The players will have the ability to control and interact with almost everything around them – people, places, and objects – through a specialized interface. The players will have the opportunity to explore the vast lands, interact with the diverse population, and discover a domain that exists only in dreams.

Though much of the story is still shrouded in secrecy, DLI revealed that the players will follow a young girl named Rachel into an unfamiliar fantasy world, and embark on an epic journey that blurs the line between fantasy and reality, a journey filled with mystery and fantasy, heartache and joy.

Darklight Interactive was founded in early 2008 and has been developing Rachel’s Walk for over a year under the guidance of David Flor (Project Lead and President of DLI) and Lauren Soffer (Vice President and Creative Director of DLI). “This project has been an exciting opportunity to push the boundaries of traditional ARGs in a way that we hope will make the story more immersive and engaging than ever before,” said Soffer. “As a storyteller first and foremost, I feel privelged to work on a project like this that puts the story as the center piece and lets all the puzzles evolve from the story.”

“Rachel’s Walk is set to be our crowning achievement, blending traditional alternate reality gaming and real world elements with a fully interactive ‘dream world’ that allows the players to have control over everything that happens,” said David Flor, President of Darklight Interactive. “It is truly a technological marvel, and for that reason we have put as much time and effort in to it as possible in order to make it perfect. When it is revealed to the world, we know that die hard alternate reality game players and traditional adventure gamers alike will not be disappointed.”

Rachel’s Walk is set to launch sometime in late 2009. Players can sign up at http://www.rachelswalk.com/.

Press please contact Darklight Interactive at info@dlimedia.com

(c) 2009, Darklight Interactive – All Rights Reserved
“Omne ignotum pro magnifico”